I spend a lot of time in the company of Trumpers. I've learned something important.

The people I work with tend to be very conservative politically. I discourage political talk on my flight deck because politics distracts from our job there and that is not ok. But every once in a while they just can’t help themselves and blurt something out. Something that they obviously feel is such a universal truth and so self evident that it isn’t “really” political. It is ALWAYS one of the following things:

1. Government doesn’t work. It is a scam that only enriches politicians.

2. Obama and anyone named Clinton are proven criminals. Everyone knows this. The Government protects them.

These folks aren’t crazy. They are highly trained, highly skilled, highly experienced and highly professional. They are screened for delusions and personality disorders before they ever get to work with me. But they believe these two things just as surely as they believe in gravity.

These two beliefs explain why they do not care if Trump lies. It explains why they don’t care if he committed crimes. It explains why they don’t believe anything the MSM has to say about Trump. They are believers. They are brainwashed.

I first started noticing signs of this 20 years ago and figured that when Clinton was never charged with anything other than lying about sex, they would incorporate that. Or that when Hillary was never found to have done anything wrong after years of investigation, they would incorporate that. Or that when the ACA gave millions of people access to health insurance and slowed the runaway rise in medical costs, they would incorporate that. I was wrong.

Instead, what these events did was to further convince them that their fundamental beliefs are true.

These folks, and just about anyone who still identifies as Republican, are beyond reaching. There is quite literally nothing that will change their belief in the two “facts”' above that define their political reality. It won’t happen when Trump is impeached. It won’t happen when the 2020 election is disputed, and it won’t happen when Trump starts jailing his political opponents. The process of making their political beliefs bulletproof has been successful and it is complete.

And from where I sit, this process has indoctrinated more people than we think. We have a big problem in this country. And it is getting worse.